The RBB affair may result in far higher costs for the Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting Corporation (RBB), which is financed by license fees, than initially foreseeable. A not inconsiderable part will be accounted for by legal fees.
RBB’s compliance officer commissioned an external law firm to examine the allegations against the broadcaster and its former director Patricia Schlesinger, who has since been dismissed by the Broadcasting Council. The Board of Directors agreed to this task.
At the law firm Lutz Abel alone, 13 lawyers are busy with the RBB affair. These include experts for compliance issues, public procurement law, labor law, IT law and data protection issues. There are also three other lawyers from other law firms specializing in criminal and press law, as the Juve-Fachverlag reports on its website.
Patricia Schlesinger is also represented by two lawyers, her husband Gerhard Spörl by a criminal lawyer and the former head of the board of directors Wolf-Dieter Wolf by a lawyer for press law and a second for criminal law.
Dorette König, the current chairwoman of the board of directors, also answered questions about the associated costs before the main committee of the Brandenburg state parliament on Tuesday. What costs you will end up with in the end, “whether 400,000 or 500,000 euros or one million euros”, you do not know yet, since these are mandate agreements based on hourly wages, she said.
So far, “low six-figure costs have been incurred,” says König. However, the tests will “continue over the coming weeks and months”. When the law firm was commissioned, they did not know whether it might be a seven-figure sum. “But it can come down to that, I hope it won’t,” King said.
Regarding the strategy of the board of directors in terminating the contract with Patricia Schlesinger, the head of the board of directors said that the broadcaster would like to keep all options open. “I can only tell you that we do not rule out dismissal without notice,” she replied to a question. The Board of Directors will decide on this in a timely manner.
Claims for recourse are also an issue: Everything will be done so that “RBB claims against Ms. Schlesinger can be asserted”.
In the meantime, it has become known that the actual income of the director and directors is significantly higher than the previously known salary totals thanks to a special bonus system. This is reported by the RBB research team on RBB24. According to Business Insider, Schlesinger and the four directors received more than 200,000 euros in “target bonuses” per year.
Other middle managers also benefited from the system introduced by Schlesinger in 2018. Hagen Brandstätter, the acting RBB director, had spoken in the Potsdam state parliament of 27 prominent employees of the station, for whom the variable salary system applies.
If previously negotiated targets were achieved, they would be given a 20 percent bonus on top of their basic salary. Anyone who has “significantly exceeded” their goals can even count on 25 percent.
